


The Mind of One

by Transistance



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Gen, Loyalty, Past Character Death, Past Violence, Rants, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 20:03:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4578081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On love and loyalty and everything in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mind of One

**Author's Note:**

> @ fellow individuals in possession of a uterus: do you find that on one specific day of that particular ""time of the month"" your head is just full of words and yelling and you can usually work that immediately into a weird piece like this? Because I do.
> 
> This is unrelated to all other fics I have written, and possibly deviates a little in terms of Grell's character?

Grell Sutcliff Grell Sutcliff Grell Sutcliff

 

She hates the fact that she is so oriented around him because she is SO MUCH MORE than her infatuation and yet it pervades her everything, her all, she lives for him and often he seems to die a little because of her and that kills her, because he is meant to be happy ~~HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY~~ and every tiny half quirk of his mouth into a smile makes her heart leap because _look_

did you see that

Will smiled.

It is such a rarity because he is so DOUR, SOUR, he is so full of NOTHING and he doesn't even try to hide it and she tries, she tries and tries and she has always tried to make him happy, to see him SMILE, so she smiles and smiles in his place until her jaws hurt and everyone is gone, at which point it slips a little but only a little because she has to be happy ~~SHE MUST BE HAPPY~~ because when she isn't happy the other emotions wander back in uninvited and they hurt a lot more than happiness.

She has perfected herself over the years, an art form, exquisite. Unique. She has the most vibrant hair and the most pristine skin which is white, white, white like alabaster or quartz because she is supposed to be a creature of marble and not flesh, sculpted, perfect, eye-catching, glorious - 

She has even managed to trim her speech over the years, make it swing like her hips and lilt and tilt as she speaks dropping low, pitching high, forcing people's ears to dance to the tune she produces and hang onto her every syllable because they roll, darling, they merge together and break a p a r t, and it drawls, so slow, because it must be slow to differentiate her from the man who used to talk through her lips, the furious words bombarding against their listener in a barrage of bitter bile that was fast, fast and angry, because that boy didn't understand himself and didn't understand why people would never listen to him and hated them for it. He was so full of hate, but he doesn't matter now, not to her. She killed him in his sleep, rose up to smother him, the flame haired boy who was so, so wrong, but instead of bursting from him in a blaze of glorious light she got stuck in his walls and is forced to inhabit the shell that once housed him, this body, all angles and hardness and wrong, built for the use of another and the worst thing is that people don't even notice the difference. They say his name when they address her; assume that she is still the boy with the painted eyes who was full of fire and pain.

She is not. She worries sometimes that perhaps he is still in there, when she talks to fast or shouts too loud, but for the most part he has been abolished. She will make sure that he has drowned in her pooling hair; that he will never surface from behind layers and layers of makeup and acting. It is not that he was bad, as such – just wrong. He was weak and impulsive and should never have been alive.

Will knew that man. She wonders sometimes if he had liked him; if he was sad to watch him die.

See, he was an innocent in comparison to her. He was quick to anger and lash out but no real damage was ever accumulated by his hand; murder is a feminine crime and each time she had committed it she had become more and more a woman. It had always irked her that Shakespeaere had never gleamed that fact; “Unsex me here!” Lady Macbeth cries, unaware in each incarnation that to do the deed she must be more a woman, not less. Grell does not understand how people cannot see this.

She does not understand how people cannot see a lot of things, because things are so simple and somehow they twist them, spiralling them into stupid shapes that only make things difficult and why can they not just _get_ that there is only her and there is only them, one massive breathing, breeding mob, and why do they not understand that this is not a bad thing?

Some of them get it. Will gets it, now, and that makes her thankful. They get it and they understand and they hit her, they hit her and hit her and kick her down as many times as will bolster their own egos and she loves the feeling as their boots connect with her stomach because _look_ at their satisfaction at being able to use her like this. And in all the other ways, too.

This is the subordination complex that has eaten away at her since forever, and she knows that it is wrong, knows that no living creature should feel the way she does about being in enough pain to black out and the sting of words as others acknowledge the simplest truth in the universe, the only idea that matters: that they are better than her.

A tiny, tiny corner of her mind disagrees, aghast as always, and screams at her that she is _wrong!_ She is so much better than them and they do not have the right to TOUCH HER so much as use her for their own gains, and she should know this, and she does know this, but she has always been told that the voices in her head are not to be trusted and so self-preservation is throw out of the window, waved away by someone who is external and thus better than her.

The problem is that it does rather swing to have a single focus point; and that is where her infatuations manifest. One person, always one person will catch her molten eyes and blind her in their brilliance, so much more worthy of life than herself, and she would be beaten down by the weight of desire for them, their happiness and fulfilment, her overwhelming wish to serve.

That was how she had become so entwined with Angelina, of course, her Madam, and for such a long time her eyes were open only to the red of that small world, the beauty that her mistress could create, the purest of the arts. Because Madam Red was better than her but also better than the whores, who abused their vitality and their ability to be gorgeous by damning themselves, and if Red thought they should die, they died. Grell made their deaths more beautiful than she could ever be, and wondered if Angelina would one day kill her in the same destructive act of divinity, for whatever reason. For any reason.

She didn't because she showed weakness ~~SHE WAS WEAK SHE SHOULD'NT HAVE BEEN WEAK HOW COULD SHE HAVE BEEN WEAK SHE WAS PERFECTION~~ and this broke the rules, all of them, and even though she was better than Grell she had to die

She had to die

she had to

die.

Because she had abused her position, because she was supposed to be better, because her sudden empathy made Grell TERRIFIED because it was a weakness, and people who were better than her had to be STRONG, and she had idolized a falsehood and what if she herself were to become that weak? Because it was love that killed the Madam, and LOVE was what Grell championed, and what if love came for her too? What if love had never been a strength at all?

And Sebastian. He was better than her, despite being a DEMON ~~HE WAS BETTER THAN HER~~ and he became a light and for a short while there were two suns in her sky and before Angelina's betrayal Grell may as well have been torn in two because on that night in the alley the Madam was herself and Sebastian was Will, her Will, Will who she had abandoned to play butler and she could never favour herself over him even though he was a demon and even though they were painted on opposite sides and they fought, because she had to fight, because if an individual could not defeat her then how could they call themselves superior? And he beat her down and she loved him all the more for it but forgot that he would want her to die and remembered only that she had to LIVE SHE HAD TO LIVE ~~BECAUSE THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE BEHIND THE VEIL~~ and he would get so much paperwork if she died and it would make him UNHAPPY and she had NO RIGHT, EVER to make him unhappy. 

She did not expect him to save her life and it made her overjoyed, so overjoyed to see him, because her love for him is based on more than betterness and because he is somehow always there, in the background, a constant.

Her love for Will is based on LOYALTY, with burns deeper than lust and lasts longer than love and will never, ever give out on her, as she will never give out on him. Because he EARNED her loyalty on their first night, that single shared experience, because he had proven himself to be better than her when she had thought him incapable of being so -

It was because he had acknowledged her, challenged her, instead of stepping aside. He paid attention to her, and beat her, and for a moment he did not see her as the red-haired boy but as a mere object, to be dealt with, banished from his path. And she had realized that that was the position in which she belonged, at his feet, because SHE BELONGS TO HIM. Entirely, irrevocably, eternally.

**Author's Note:**

> I might attempt to build on the ideas of this all later, in a more controlled fic.
> 
> Was going to add more - on the subjects of grades and effort, self-harm and marks, and a third thing which I can remember thinking but actually eludes me now - but the motivation evaporated after twenty four hours and left me high and dry with this.
> 
> Speaking of motivation, guess who's hit writer's block on Incompatible!


End file.
